Lights, Camera, Photocast: Sharing Photos with iPhoto 6
Date: Mar 10, 2006
Photocasting is one of the biggest new features in iPhoto 6 and it offers a great new way to share your photos with family and friends. But how do you publish a photocast and make certain that anyone with a Mac or PC can view it in spite of the problems reported with some RSS readers?
What Exactly Is Photocasting—and How Does it Work?
iPhoto has always been designed with ease of use in mind, making it easy to copy photos from your camera, organize them in albums, and share them in a variety of ways—from printing at home to ordering prints and photo books to putting them on the Web. By linking iPhoto with Apple’s .Mac service, you can create slick, professional-looking albums with the mere click of a few buttons.
iPhoto even lets you share photo albums (or your entire iPhoto library) directly with other Mac users, providing you’re on the same home, office, or school network using the Bon Jour/Rendezvous network protocol. Just check the Share My Photos and/or Look For Shared Photos options in the Sharing pane of the iPhoto preferences (found under the iPhoto menu in the menu bar) and you’re set for sharing photos with or viewing photos of any Mac user on the network (see Figure 1). No need to email or upload photos to .Mac (or another Web service) or to go looking for someone else’s pictures online. Everything is simply there in iPhoto.
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Figure 1 Setting sharing options in the iPhoto preferences
The reason I mention these two iPhoto features is that the new photocasting option in iPhoto 6 is almost a combination of the two. (iPhoto 6 is part of Apple’s new iLife ’06, which comes free with all new Macs and is a $79 upgrade for existing Mac users.)
iPhoto 6 allows you to share your photo albums with other iPhoto 6 users as photocasts. When someone subscribes to your photocast, the contents of the album are automatically added as a special photocast album to his or her iPhoto library. When you add, change, or delete pictures from the photocast album, subscribers see those changes reflected in the photocast albums in their iPhoto libraries. As with sharing photos using Bon Jour/Rendezvous, there’s no need to email or visit Web sites—the process is almost completely transparent to you as the creator of the photocast and to subscribers.
Photocasts are not just for iPhoto 6 users. Apple designed photocasts using RSS, the technology that’s used to power podcasts, My Yahoo, and many news and blog sites. RSS allows users to subscribe to a feed that contains regularly updated content (such as a blog or a podcast) by using an RSS reader. The RSS reader periodically checks the feed to see whether new content has been posted. When new content is posted, the RSS reader displays either the entire content or an abstract of the content to the user, along with a link to the content in its entirety.
Photocasts are actually RSS feeds that contain photos rather than audio files, text, or Web content. So any user with a recent-version RSS reader can subscribe to a photocast and view the photos it contains. Subscribers using an RSS reader can then print or save the photos in a photocast. If they have an earlier version of iPhoto, they can even add the photos to their iPhoto library manually.
The way in which photocasting actually works is that when you publish an album as a photocast, iPhoto uploads the photos to a section of your iDisk (which is why photocasting requires a .Mac membership). At the same time, iPhoto generates an RSS feed that contains information about where the photos are stored, which is also stored in your iDisk.
You then give people the address of that RSS feed, which iPhoto will tell you once it publishes the photocast (it will even give you the option of sending an announcement email). If your photocast subscribers have iLife ’06, they can subscribe using iPhoto and it will automatically create a photocast album and download the images for them.
If your subscribers don’t have iPhoto 6, they can use another RSS reader. Any time you make changes to the album that is being photocast, iPhoto will automatically update the RSS feed and upload or delete photos from your iDisk, if needed. When iPhoto or another RSS reader detects a change in the RSS feed stored in your iDisk, it will download the appropriate new photos (and delete any that have been removed).
Publishing a Photocast Step-by-Step
Turning an album in iPhoto into a photocast is actually a very simple process. First, select the album in the Source pane at the left side of the screen, as you would to view or edit pictures in the album (see Figure 2).
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Figure 2 Selecting an album to photocast
Second, click the Photocast button in the toolbar beneath the contents pane on the right side of the screen (or select Photocast from the Share menu in the menu bar). The Publish A Photocast dialog box displays, as shown in Figure 3.
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Figure 3 Publish A Photocast dialog box
You can use the Photo Size drop-down menu to choose to publish photos at their full size or at a smaller size (which can save storage space in your iDisk and speed transfer times when the photos in the album are updated or when subscribers download the photocast). If you choose a smaller size, images will be scaled down when the photocast is published.
The Publish A Photocast dialog box includes a checkbox to designate whether the images in the photocast should be automatically updated when you make changes to the album. This checkbox is selected by default; when you add, remove, or edit photos, those changes will be reflected in the RSS feed as well as in the albums of your photocast subscribers. If you deselect this option, the photocast will be published once and will not be updated if you make changes to the album. You can, however, update the photocast manually by clicking the photocast icon next to the album.
You also have the option of specifying a username and password that will be required for people to subscribe to and view your photocast. This feature offers you the ability to privately share pictures with friends and family. To use it, simply check the Require Name And Password box and then enter a username and password for the photocast. Don’t forget to include the username and password when you give others the photocast address.
What Happens After You Click Publish?
When you click the Publish button in the photocast dialog box, iPhoto will generate the RSS feed and resize the images (unless you chose to publish them at actual size). iPhoto will then transfer the photos to your iDisk. Depending on your Internet connection and the number and size of the photos in the album, this process could take awhile. You will see a small clock icon next to the album name that indicates the progress of the transfer (see Figure 4). Once the transfer is complete, iPhoto will display a confirmation message that includes the address of the photocast, as shown in Figure 5. It will also offer you the option of sending an announcement email that includes information on how others can subscribe to the photocast. You can edit the email further to include a personal message and description of the photocast. The album will also have a photocast icon next to its name in the Source pane (see Figure 6).
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Figure 4 Photocast progress icon
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Figure 5 Succesful photocast publication dialog box
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Figure 6 Icon for a published photocast
Stopping a Photocast
To stop a photocast, simply select the album in the source pane and click the photocast button again. iPhoto will ask if you are sure that you want to stop the photocast. If you click the Stop Publishing button, iPhoto will remove the RSS feed and photos from your iDisk.
You can also stop publishing one or more photocasts by using the Photocasts pane in the iPhoto preferences dialog box. This pane includes a list box containing all the photocasts that you’re publishing. You can select one or more of them and then click the Stop Publishing button to stop publishing them.
When you stop publishing a photocast, users who have subscribed to it using iPhoto 6 will receive an error message the next time iPhoto attempts to check for updates to the photocast. The message will simply say that the photocast cannot be found. Users will still have the photocast album (and the most recent set of pictures that it contained) available in their iPhoto library, unless they delete the photocast album (by selecting it and clicking Delete). Users subscribing with an RSS reader will receive a message that the RSS feed cannot be located. They will not have access to any photos contained in the photocast unless they had previously stored them on their computer.
Subscribing to a Photocast Using iPhoto 6
Subscribing to a photocast using iPhoto 6 is very simple and provides the best photocast experience because the photocast is treated just like any other album. You can use the pictures for slideshows, prints, and photo books. Photocasts that you subscribe to also appear as albums in the iLife media browser, making it easy to use the pictures in iWeb, iMovie HD, and iDVD; or to use the entire photocast as a screensaver.
To subscribe to a photocast from within iPhoto, simply choose Subscribe To Photocast from the File menu. A dialog box displays, asking you to enter the address of the photocast, as shown in Figure 7. After you enter the address, click Subscribe. iPhoto will then connect to the photocast and begin downloading the pictures in the photocast.
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Figure 7 Subscribing to a photocast
The photocast will be displayed as an album in the Source pane to the left of the iPhoto window. As shown in Figure 8, it will have a purple photocast icon instead of the traditional blue album icon (this icon will also be displayed in the iLife media browser when selecting photos in other applications).
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Figure 8 Icon for a photocast to which you have subscribed using iPhoto
If you’re using the most recent version of Safari (2.0.3 or higher, which can be obtained from Apple’s Software Update) and you have iPhoto 6 installed, you can also subscribe by clicking a link to a photocast on a Web site or from within an email. Safari will recognize the RSS feed as a photocast and will automatically open iPhoto. iPhoto will then ask if you want to subscribe to the photocast.
Receiving Updates from a Photocast
iPhoto will query the RSS feeds of each photocast that you subscribe to on a regular basis to see whether there have been any updates. If there are updates, then iPhoto will update the photocast album accordingly. You can choose how frequently iPhoto checks for updates to your subscribed photocasts using the Photocast pane in the iPhoto preferences.
Using the Check For New Photos drop-down menu, you can have iPhoto check for updates once every hour, day, or week (the default is week, as shown in Figure 9). You can also choose to check for updates manually, in which case iPhoto will never check for updates unless you tell it to.
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Figure 9 Setting the photocast options in the iPhoto preferences
To check for updates manually, click the update icon next to the photocast name in the source pane. You can check for updates manually at any time, even if you have set the photocast preferences to check on a regular basis.
To unsubscribe from a photocast in iPhoto, simply select the photocast album in the Source pane and click Delete on the keyboard (as you would do to delete any other album). iPhoto will prompt you to make sure that you want to unsubscribe from the photocast and will offer you the option to transfer the pictures currently in the photocast into your iPhoto library for later use.
Subscribing Using Safari or Another RSS Reader
The process of subscribing to a photocast using an RSS reader will vary depending on the RSS reader being used. If you’re using Safari version 2 or higher (included with Mac OS X 10.4 and higher), you can view a photocast by simply going to the address of the photocast. To subscribe to the photocast, simply add it to your bookmarks in Safari. To subscribe using a different RSS reader, refer to the reader’s documentation because the process is no different from subscribing to any other RSS feed.
Be aware, however, that not all RSS readers are capable of properly interpreting a photocast using the address provided by iPhoto because the address generated by iPhoto begins with photocast.mac.com, but actually redirects to web.mac.com (both indicate files that are stored in your iDisk). A number of RSS readers can’t interpret the RSS feed properly when it gets redirected like this. If you send a photocast address to users, and they get a syntax error message from their RSS readers, substituting web.mac.com at the beginning of the address instead of photocast.mac.com should allow them to view and subscribe to your photocast.